A Calgary woman’s Caribbean holiday snapshot has gone viral, but it’s no photo of beachside frolicking that’s made Mary Jo Penkala famous.The Calgary hairdresser was aboard a WestJet flight to St. Lucia when she peered out the window and saw a “funky-looking” plume billowing above the rest of the clouds. Penkala began snapping photos furiously as the mushroom-shaped cloud shot higher in the sky.It wasn’t until the captain made an announcement urging passengers of the Boeing 737 to peek out the left side of the airplane that Penkala realized she had a perfect, birds-eye view of a volcano erupting.
And as the lower clouds parted, Penkala got the perfect shot, too: thick plumes of ash streaming thousands of metres into the sky from the Caribbean island below, all captured on the Canon Sure Shot camera Penkala kept focused on the view.
The spectacular photo was picked up by a U.K. press agency and has now found its way into news publications around the world.
“It’s going all over. It’s nuts. I’m excited,” Penkala said Thursday.
“I’m not any big-time photographer. I just got so lucky, and I got a perfect shot.”
Penkala and her partner, Barry Steinfeld, boarded the flight to St. Lucia on Feb. 11 to escape Calgary’s dreary winter.
They were flying over the Caribbean when they first noticed the unusual sight.
“It boggled your mind,” said Steinfeld, a Calgary lawyer.
“We were 35,000 or 40,000 feet (10,500 to 12,000 metres) in the air, there was this huge cloud coming from this little island that you could see under the cloud formation.
“At first when I looked at it, it sort of reminded me of a nuclear bomb cloud. It was pretty spectacular.”
Penkala was in the window seat on the left side of the plane, which had the best view of the eruption of the Soufriere Hills volcano on the island of Montserrat.
Apparently, the volcano’s lava dome had begun to collapse, shooting the massive cloud of ashes far into the sky, Steinfeld said.
When the passengers arrived at their St. Lucia resort, they were buzzing about the incredible scene.
Though the couple’s plane didn’t fly close enough to the volcano to be in any danger, a number of later flights were cancelled because of the volcanic ash, which can seize up an aircraft’s engine, Steinfeld said.
Back in Calgary a couple weeks later, Penkala decided to send her photo to National Geographic online.
That’s where it was picked up by the U.K. agency, which then distributed it to a number of international publications.
Penkala said the experience has given her a good holiday tale to tell family and friends back home.
“I never felt unsafe for one minute. I just thought it was a neat thing of nature we got to see. We got front-row seats.”
Steinfeld said the aerial view of the volcano was one of the most amazing he’s ever seen, even if he wasn’t the one to capture the now-famous shot.
Though, as he pointed out, laughing: “It was my camera.”
jkomarnicki@theherald.canwest.com
